"A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon."

"A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon."

I still would expect Amazon to make some sort of official announcement, not just some news report in Seattlepi.

I also found the explanation to be a confusing non-explanation. I still don't understand the actual mechanism by which this happened.

My own sense is that Amazon is covering its ass. Whether they were hacked, or made a corporate anti-gay decision, or let some rogue employee(s) impose their own personal values on the system, doesn't really concern me.

Amazon failed, period. They will continue to portray themselves in the best light, and nothing they say can be believed. So it is with all corporations.

Both the hacker and the human error explanations are certainly plausible.

I'd go with the hacker thing. It's certainly not unreasonable to envision a rabid right wing extremist sweating over his keyboard as he laboriously bring down rankings on pro-gay lit and brought up the rankings of the anti-gay ones.

The glitch explanation on the other hand is simply highly unlikely. That coming from a sometime programmer. It's just not possible that a glitch can cause something that specifically targets a literary genre (unless Amazon owns some really amazing AI or unless each book is tagged 'pro-gay' and 'anti-gay').